*** London Independent (2)
*** London Daily Telegraph
*** Toronto Star ( via Reuters )
*** Los Angeles Times ( bylined reporter's article from
London )
*** Atlanta Constitution ( bylined reporter's article from
London )
*** Guardian, London
*** New York Times (bylined reporter's article from London
*** Express, London
*** Financial Times, London
Irving is a falsifier and a liar, says publisher Irving
tells court of `verbal Yellow Star'
Ian Burrell Home Affairs Correspondent
01/12/2000
The Independent - London
FOREIGN
Page 10
(Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC)
THE RIGHT-WING historian David Irving was described
yesterday as a "falsifier of history" and a "liar" at the
start of a High Court libel battle.
In a packed court, Richard Rampton QC, representing Penguin
Books, said: "Mr Irving calls himself an historian. The
truth is, however, that he is not an historian at all, but a
falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar. Mr
Irving has used many different means to falsify history:
invention, misquotation, suppression, distortion,
manipulation and - not least - mistranslation. But all these
techniques have the same ultimate effect: falsification of
the truth."
The historian is suing the publisher and the American author
Deborah Lipstadt over her book, Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, in which she describes
Mr Irving as a "Holocaust denier". Mr Rampton repeated the
allegation. He said: "By this I mean that he denies that
the Nazis planned and carried out the systematic murder of
millions of Jews, in particular - though by no means
exclusively - by the use of homicidal gas chambers, and in
particular - though by no means exclusively - at Auschwitz
in southern Poland."
But Mr Irving told the court that he he had never denied the
existence of the Holocaust. He said: "No person in full
command of his mental faculties and with even the slightest
understanding of what happened in World War Two can deny
that the tragedy actually happened, however much we
dissident historians may wish to quibble about the means,
the scale, the dates and other minutiae."
Mr Irving said the tag "Holocaust denier" had become "one of
the most potent phrases in the arsenal of insult". He
described the expression as "a verbal Yellow Star".
Mr Irving, 61, who has been banned from at least five
countries because of his views, told the court he had never
claimed any specialist knowledge of the Holocaust. He said:
"If I am an expert in anything at all, I may be so immodest
as to submit that it is in the role that Adolf Hitler played
in the propagation of World War Two."
Mr Irving, who is representing himself, said the Holocaust
should not be the focus of the libel case, which is expected
to last three months. "What is moot here is not what
happened in those sites of atrocities - but what happened
over the last 32 years, on my writing desk in my apartment
off Grosvenor Square," he said. "This inquiry should not
leave the four walls of my study."
Mr Irving said publishers were afraid to be associated with
him: "I have since 1996 seen one fearful publisher after
another falling away from me, declining to reprint my works,
refusing to accept new commissions and turning their backs
on me when I approach."
The historian claimed that Ms Lipstadt and Penguin were part
of an "organised international endeavour" to "destroy my
career and to vandalise my legitimacy as an historian".
Mr Rampton suggested that Mr Irving used distorted history
"in pursuit of his exoneration of Adolf Hitler and his
denial of the Holocaust". He said the historian often gave
talks to "radical right- wing, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi
groups". During a speech in Canada in 1991, Mr Rampton said
Mr Irving had said aboutAuschwitz: "Once we admit the fact
that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of
people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died
elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?"
***
A war between historians that may never end
Boyd Tonkin
01/12/2000
The Independent - London
FOREIGN
Page 10
(Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC)
ANYONE WHO saw Schindler's List will remember the closing
scene, in which each of the surviving Schindlerjuden places
a stone on his or her rescuer's memorial. Some do look old
and frail; others, remarkably trim and vigorous. The
literature of the Holocaust continues to arouse such passion
and polemic in large part because it still relates to living
memory. Many children, after all, were dispatched to the
extermination camps. Some who came through that torment will
only recently have reached retirement age.
This history is alive, and it kicks. Hence any apparent
assault on the agreed version puts into question not just an
academic consensus, but the integrity of living people.
"Though denial of the Holocaust may be an attack on the
history of the annihilation of the Jews," wrote the
historian Deborah Lipstadt in the 1993 book that David
Irving now disputes, "at its core it poses a threat to all
who believe that knowledge and memory are among the
keystones of our civilisation."
That knowledge, and those memories, still service a
flourishing literature of witness - a genre that only
emerged in the 1970s, with such figures as Primo Levi and
Jean Amery, after two decades of postwar silence. Even in
1999, important new additions were arriving: the painstaking
diaries of Victor Klemperer, for instance, one of the few
German Jews who survived life under the Third Reich. Roman
Frister's memoir The Cap told how one young camp inmate
bought his own life at the cost of another's death. And next
month will see the publication of a posthumous autobiography
by the much-loved rabbi and Auschwitz survivor Hugo Gryn.
Not surprisingly, this torrent of testimony has carried in
its wake one or two outright frauds. Last year the pathetic
story of Binyaminn Wilkomirski, who falsely claimed to have
spent his childhood in the camps, finally came to light. He
would weep when he recounted his "ordeal", one sceptic
noted; genuine survivors never can.
Such rare cases of exploitation have prompted some experts
to wonder whether the state-approved culture of Holocaust
reminiscence may end up doing more harm than good.
This year, two American Jewish historians are due to publish
challenges to what one cynic has dubbed "Shoah business".
Peter Novick's The Holocaust and Collective Memory will ask
whether in effect it hands Hitler an ultimate victory.
Norman Finkelstein, in The Holocaust Industry, will argue
that the memorial cult insults the victims of Nazism more
than "the rubbish of Holocaust deniers" does.
The other side of this story concerns not that flagrant,
truth- mocking "rubbish", but the revival of a kind of
German patriotism in historical accounts of the Second World
War. David Irving himself has acted as chief English-
language standard-bearer for this movement. In the 1980s a
group of German historians - a few veterans, but many from
the younger postwar generation - began to "normalise"
accounts of military and civilian life under the Third
Reich. In the confident era of reunification, a tone of
impatience with the burden of collective guilt crept into
many studies.
Ordinary Germans began to emerge more as victims than
villains. So a writer such as Andreas Hillgruber could hint
at a comparison between the suffering endured by Wehrmacht
soldiers in the East and the mass persecutions committed by
the Germans themselves. A bitter "historians' war" erupted
between the "revisionists" and those who refused to let
attention shift from the enormity of Nazi crimes. This was
the background to the intensely divisive book by the United
States historian Daniel Goldhagen, who asserted most of
those decent, hard-pressed normal Germans were in fact
enthusiastic anti- Semites, and "Hitler's willing
executioners".
Oddly enough, the revisionist readings of the Reich came to
the fore just as it grew clear that the senior Nazi who most
successfully maintained his innocence had eventually
accepted his complicity in genocide. In 1995 Gitta Sereny
published Albert Speer: his battle with truth - the final
fruit of herinterviews with Hitler's pet architect and
minister for war production, who spent 20 years in Spandau
jail. At last, we learnt that the "good Nazi" had in the end
acknowledged his awareness of the Holocaust.
"My chief guilt," Speer wrote in 1977, was "my tacit
acceptance of the persecution and murder of millions of
Jews." He admitted that to the Jewish Board of Deputies in
South Africa, which had sought his support in banning the
notorious Holocaust-denial pamphlet "Did Six Million Die?"
If Speer had said as much at the Nuremberg trial, he would
undoubtedly have been hanged.
***
History of the Holocaust goes on trial: Author sues for
libel over book he says made him an international pariah and
threatened his livelihood. Neil Tweedie reports
Neil Tweedie
01/12/2000
The Daily Telegraph
Page 05
Copyright (C) 2000 The Daily Telegraph; Source: World
Reporter (TM)
The historian
THE controversial British historian David Irving claimed he
was the victim of an "organised international endeavour" to
destroy his career at the opening of a libel trial in London
yesterday.
Mr Irving is suing Prof Deborah Lipstadt , an American
author, and her publishers over claims in her latest book -
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory - that he is one of the most prominent and dangerous
"Holocaust deniers" in the world.
Mr Irving, 62, is conducting his own case. In his opening
address he told Mr Justice Gray that his livelihood and that
of his family had been put in jeopardy.
He said: "By virtue of the activities of the defendants and
those who funded her and guided her hand, I have since 1996
seen one fearful publisher after another falling away from
me, declining to reprint my works, refusing to accept new
commissions and turning their backs on me when I approach."
He said being described as a "Holocaust denier" was "like
being called a wife-beater or a paedophile".
Mr Irving told the judge, who is is sitting without a jury,
that far from being a "Holocaust denier", he had repeatedly
brought attention to major aspects of the Holocaust through
his discovery of fresh documents from the Second World War.
He had been the victim of a concerted attack on his
character and work by an international network of Left-
wingers and Jews who had succeeded in making him a "pariah".
Mr Irving said it was not his intention in bringing the case
to reopen the debate over the Holocaust. He had sued Miss
Lipstadt because she had accused him of "manipulation and
distortion", something he vehemently denied.
"Holocaust denier" was, said Mr Irving, a particularly evil
phrase because no one could deny what had happened in the
war. Dissident historians were merely quibbling about dates,
scale and other "minutiae".
"It is enough for the label to be attached, for the attachee
to find himself designated as a pariah, an outcast from
normal society. It is a verbal Yellow Star [of David]."
He denied he was anti-Semitic, citing his friendship with
Jewish people from his schooldays. He numbered the publisher
George Weidenfeld among his friends.
Mr Irving, the author of Hitler's War and Goebbels:
Mastermind of the Third Reich, said Miss Lipstadt and
Penguin Books were part of "an organised international
endeavour" determined to destroy his career and "vandalise"
his legitimacy as a historian. He said that he had always
looked on his books as his pension fund and a legacy for his
four children, but that was no longer the situation.
Because of "the nature of the odium that has been generated
by the waves of hatred recklessly propagated against me by
the defendants" his "pension" had vanished "as assuredly as
if I had been employed by one of those companies taken over
by the late Mr Robert Maxwell".
Mr Irving claims that Miss Lipstadt 's book alleges that he
has denied the Holocaust, has distorted statistics and
documents to serve his own ideological purposes and to reach
historically untenable conclusions, and that he has
knowingly consorted with extremists. Penguin and Miss
Lipstadt , the holder of the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish
and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta,
Georgia, deny libel and plead justification.
They claim that Mr Irving has denied both the Holocaust and
that gas chambers were used to carry it out, and that he
holds extremist views and distorts history.
Mr Irving said that he had never held himself out to be a
Holocaust expert and had not written books about it.
If he was an expert on anything it was the role that Hitler
played in the war. "As a peripheral matter to that topic, on
which I have written a number of books, I inevitably
investigated the extent to which Hitler participated in or
had cognisance of the Holocaust. That was the sum total of
my involvement as a book author up to the launching of these
writs."
He said that he intended to show that "far from being a
Holocaust denier" he had repeatedly drawn attention to major
aspects of the Holocaust and had provided historical
documents to scholars and the public of which they had been
previously unaware.
"I submit that, harsh though it may seem, the court should
take no interest in that tragedy [the Holocaust]." What was
at stake was not what happened in Poland or Russia 50 years
ago, but over the last 32 years "on my writing desk in my
apartment off Grosvenor Square".
He said that to justify her allegations it was not enough
for Miss Lipstadt to show that he had misrepresented what
happened but that he knew what happened and "perversely and
deliberately" portrayed it differently.
Mr Irving said that he once earned more than pounds 100,000
a year in royalties but had been done "very real pecuniary
damage" by the defendants.
He said Denying the Holocaust purported to be "a scholarly
investigation of the operations of an international network
conspiracy of people whom the second defendant [Miss
Lipstadt ] has dubbed `Holocaust deniers'. It is not."
Holocaust deniers "has become one of the most potent phrases
in the arsenal of insult, replacing the N-word, the F-word,
and a whole alphabet of other slurs . . ." Mr Irving added.
The judge would undoubtedly hear from the defendants, he
said, that he was fined a very substantial sum of money by
the German Government.
"It is no matter for shame for me, although it has had
catastrophic consequences, as it now makes me de facto `a
convict', with a criminal record and as such liable to a
concatenation of further indignities and sanctions in every
foreign country which I now wish to visit."
It arose from a remark made during an address he made to an
audience in Munich in 1990 - "We now know that the gas
chamber shown to the tourists at Auschwitz is a fake built
by the Poles after the war, just like the one established by
the Americans at Dachau." Mr Irving added: "This may well
raise eyebrows. It might be found to be offensive by
sections of the community and if they take such offence, I
can assure this court that I regret it and that such was not
my intention.
"These remarks were true; the Poles admitted it in January
1995 and under English law truth has always been regarded as
an absolute defence."
Mr Irving continued: "We shall hear, indeed from the
defence's own expert witnesses - though perhaps the
admission will have to be bludgeoned out of them - that the
gas chamber shown to the tourists at Auschwitz was indeed
built by the Polish communists three years after the war was
over."
The hearing continues.
The accuser
DEBORAH Lipstadt , Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust
Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, accused David Irving
of being a liar who systematically suppressed, distorted and
manipulated history in an attempt to deny the existence of
the Holocaust.
In Denying the Holocaust, she claims that he is one of the
most prominent "Holocaust deniers". His mastery of
historical documents makes him a particularly dangerous
exponent of the claim, shared by neo-fascist and some Muslim
fundamentalist groups, she says.
Yesterday her counsel, Richard Rampton, QC, who also
represents her publishers Penguin Books, told the court: "Mr
Irving calls himself a historian. The truth is, however,
that he is a falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is
a liar.
"Lies may take various forms . . . but in the end all forms
of lying converge into a single definition: wilful,
deliberate misstatement of the facts. Mr Irving has used
many different means to falsify history: invention,
misquotation, suppression, distortion, manipulation and -
not least - mistranslation."
Mr Rampton said Mr Irving's character could be judged by
those he associated with: neo-Nazis, American white
supremacists and the British National Party.
He quoted a speech in which Mr Irving said that Auschwitz
was merely a slave labour camp where large numbers of people
happened to die from overwork, disease and starvation.
Mr Irving said at Calgary, Alberta, in September 1991: "I
don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's
baloney, it's a legend.
"I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on
the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than
ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.
"Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are
so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number
increases as the years go past, which is biologically very
odd. Because I'm going to form an Association of Auschwitz
survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other liars, or
the ASSHOLS."
Mr Rampton concluded: "This is obviously an important case.
The essence of it is Mr Irving's honesty and integrity as a
chronicler - I shy away from the word `historian' - of these
matters.
"For if it be right that Mr Irving, driven by his extremist
views, has devoted his energies to the deliberate
falsification of this tragic episode in history, then, by
exposing that dangerous fraud in this court, the defendants
may properly be applauded for having performed a significant
public service."
***
Holocaust accusation touches off libel suit
01/12/2000
The Toronto Star
1
NE13
Copyright (c) 2000 The Toronto Star
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's most controversial historian,
who says there is no evidence six million Jews were
slaughtered by the Nazis, kicked off a libel action
yesterday against accusations he is a "Holocaust denier."
David Irving is fighting in London's High Court over
accusations by Prof. Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University in
Atlanta, Ga., that he is "a dangerous spokesman for
Holocaust denial."
Irving said Lipstadt , who wrote a book exploring links
between the work of historians like Irving and the growing
popularity of white supremacists in the U.S. and neo-Nazis
in Europe, was out to destroy his career and "vandalize" his
legitimacy as an historian.
Representing himself in his action to sue Lipstadt and her
publishers, Penguin Books, for libel, the right-wing
historian told the court in London he had made a significant
contribution to the world's knowledge of the Holocaust.
Irving was fined in May, 1992, after a German court
convicted him of telling a 1990 public meeting of around 800
people in Munich there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz and
the Nazi death camp itself was built as a fake.
He was banned from Germany after his 1992 conviction and has
been refused entry to Canada, Italy, Austria and Australia.
Irving, who described Auschwitz as "a very brutal slave
labour camp" where around 100,000 people died, appealed in
January, 1993, saying: "There were no gas chambers at
Auschwitz; I will not change my opinion."
His appeal was rejected.
The libel case is expected to last three months.
***
The Holocaust case
Helen McCabe
01/12/2000
ABIX - Australasian Business Intelligence: The Advertiser
Page 36
Copyright (C) 2000 Business Intelligence Australia Pty Ltd.;
Source: World Reporter
(TM)
On 11 January 2000, controversial Great Britain historian,
David Irving, launched defamation action against Penguin
Books. He is claiming in the High Court of Great Britain
that its publication, in 1997, of "Denying the Holocaust:
The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory", by Deborah
Lipstadt , led to him being falsely accused of distorting
history. It also allegedly associated him with fascist
extremists and their practices. In the late-1970s, he caused
a furore with his book, "Hitler's War" - which claimed the
extermination of the Jews was carried out without German
leader, Aloph Hitler's knowledge. It also doubted
allegations 6m Jews had been killed.
***
Foreign Desk
Holocaust 'Denial' Trial Gets Underway Courts: British
historian, who says there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz,
claims Jews are out to malign him.
MARJORIE MILLER
01/12/2000
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
Page A-8
Copyright 2000 / The Times Mirror Company
LONDON -- In what promises to be a landmark libel case over
Holocaust denial, Hitler biographer David Irving portrayed
himself before Britain's High Court on Tuesday as a victim
of an international Jewish conspiracy to blacken his
reputation.
The British historian, much criticized for his widely
dismissed views that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz
and that Hitler did not authorize the extermination of Jews,
rejected a U.S. professor's claim that he is a Holocaust
denier.
He said there has been an "organized international endeavor"
to ruin him and that he has been branded with the epithet
like someone publicly accused of wife-beating or sexually
abusing children.
Irving is suing Deborah Lipstadt , a professor at Atlanta's
Emory University and author of "Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," and her British
publisher, Penguin UK, for libel. He is seeking damages and
a halt to the book's further publication.
In her book, Lipstadt calls Irving "one of the most
dangerous" Holocaust deniers, a man who deliberately bends
historical evidence to fit his extreme political views.
In its opening remarks, the defense branded Irving a liar.
"Mr. Irving calls himself an historian. The truth is,
however, that he is not an historian at all, but a falsifier
of history," said defense lawyer Richard Rampton. "To put it
bluntly, he is a liar."
Yehuda Bauer, director of research at Israel's Yad Vashem
Holocaust museum, said the libel lawsuit is an important
case.
"Irving made a fatal mistake. He thought he would use the
trial to publicize his views. But they are going to turn the
tables on him and expose Holocaust denial as the stupid sham
it is," Bauer said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem.
Irving said he chose to sue Lipstadt because her publishers
were "foolish enough" to print her book in Britain, where
libel laws are much tougher. The burden of proof is on the
defendant, and, unlike in the United States, public figures
are treated the same as private citizens.
The case is being heard by a judge rather than a jury
because it is considered highly technical.
Both Irving and defense attorney Rampton insisted in their
opening statements that this is not a trial about whether
the Holocaust occurred or how many people died in it.
Rather, it is about whether Irving deliberately manipulated
and falsified history.
But the trial, which is scheduled to last three months and
include the testimony of some of the foremost experts on
World War II, is regarded by both mainstream historians and
Holocaust deniers as a chance to prove their cases.
"At the end of the trial, on the question of gas chambers,
either the world will accept that, yes, they existed, or
they will raise an eyebrow in astonishment and say, 'What
the hell?' " Irving said in an interview.
Irving, 62, is the author of "Hitler's War" and "Goebbels:
Mastermind of the Third Reich," a book he published himself
in Britain after he was unable to find a U.S. publisher.
He has been fined for Holocaust denial in France and
Germany, where it is against the law to propagate Nazi
literature and ideology. He has been called a court
historian for Hitler and even a fascist. But he is also
regarded by some mainstream historians as a skilled
researcher.
Irving began his case Tuesday by reading a 55-page opening
statement in which he insisted that he had made important
contributions to the world's understanding of the Holocaust.
"Far from being a 'Holocaust denier,' I have repeatedly
drawn attention to major aspects of the Holocaust," he said.
"I have provided historical documents both to the community
of scholars and to the general public, of which they were
completely unaware before I discovered these documents and
published and translated them," he said.
He blamed a British Jewish group, which he identified out of
court as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, as leading
the campaign against him to "vandalize" his reputation.
The defense responded with quotes from books and speeches in
which Irving denied the Holocaust took place, exonerated
Hitler and called Auschwitz "baloney."
***
Historians' views clash in court A British author testifies
that an Emory professor's labeling him a 'Holocaust denier'
has hurt his career.
Bert Roughton Jr.
01/12/2000
The Atlanta Constitution
Home
Page A; 3
(Copyright, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution - 2000)
A maverick British historian testified Tuesday that a book
written by an Emory University professor was part of an
international conspiracy to silence him and end his attempts
to challenge conventional understandings of the Holocaust.
David Irving, who believes the Nazi campaign to exterminate
Jews has been greatly exaggerated, is suing Deborah Lipstadt
and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel over assertions
made about him in her 1994 book, "Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory." They deny any libel.
Lipstadt portrayed Irving as a prominent and dangerous
"Holocaust denier" who believes the familiar story of the
systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis is untrue.
She also depicts him as an extremist who manipulates,
distorts and falsifies history for his own purposes.
In his opening argument, Irving said the book is part of an
international effort to silence him because his research
undermines Jewish claims for compensation for the Holocaust.
"My Lord, if we were to seek a title for this libel action,
I would venture to suggest 'Pictures at an Execution' --- my
execution," Irving said, addressing the wigged and robed
judge hearing the lawsuit.
Irving, a full-time writer, said he had counted on his work
to provide him money to retire and a legacy for his four
children. "I have since 1996 seen one fearful publisher
after another falling away from me, declining to reprint my
works, refusing to accept new commissions and turning their
backs on me," he said. "In short, my pension has vanished."
Throughout the proceedings, Lipstadt sat silent at a table
in front of the judge.
Wearing a navy-blue pin-striped suit, the articulate and
animated 62-year-old Irving read his remarks for more than
two hours in a cramped courtroom in the grand Royal Courts
of Justice. The self- taught historian rambled from sweeping
assertions about the damage done his reputation by what he
characterized as an international Jewish conspiracy to
detailed passages of private notes of key Nazi leaders. He
also shared a bizarre account of his sneaking glass plates
containing copies of Joseph Goebbels' handwritten diaries
out of a Russian archive to London.
He disputed the book's central point that he manipulated the
historic record to support his version of the Holocaust
story. He suggested that he may be guilty of being a
"rotten, lazy or indolent" historian, but not a dishonest
one.
Irving said that Lipstadt 's use of the phrase "Holocaust
denier" to describe him has been deeply damaging.
"It is a poison to which there is virtually no antidote," he
said. "It is like being called a wife-beater or a pedophile.
It is enough for the label to be attached, for the attachee
to find himself designated as a pariah, an outcast from
normal society. It is a verbal Yellow Star.
"Far from being a 'Holocaust denier,' I have repeatedly
drawn attention to major aspects of the Holocaust," he said.
Irving, who stated in a 1977 book that Hitler was unaware of
the mass slaughter of Jews until 1943, said the term
"Holocaust" is meaningless.
"The word 'Holocaust' is an artificial label commonly
attached to one of the greatest and still most unexplained
tragedies of this past century," he said.
In his view, Auschwitz was a slave labor camp but not a
death camp. He argues that gas chambers at the camp were
built after the war.
In response, lead defense attorney Richard Rampton, also in
wig and robe, attacked Irving directly. "Mr. Irving calls
himself an historian," Rampton said. "The truth is, however,
that he is not an historian at all, but a falsifier of
history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar."
The lawyer also argued that Irving's statements during
appearances before "radical right wing, neo-fascist, neo-
Nazi groups of people" reveal something more about his
motives.
During a 1991 appearance in Canada, Rampton said, Irving
harshly disputed accepted versions of the Auschwitz story.
"It's baloney, it's legend," Rampton quoted Irving as
saying. "I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women
died in the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at
Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas chamber in
Auschwitz."
While it is widely accepted that at least 1 million people
died at Auschwitz, Irving has argued that the number is
closer to 100,000, and that most fell victim to illness and
deprivation.
The trial, which is being heard before a judge without a
jury, is expected to last three months. It is scheduled to
continue Wednesday.
Under British law, Lipstadt and Penguin Books bear the
burden of proving that statements about Irving contained in
the book are true.
Photo David Irving / Associated Press Photo Academic Deborah
Lipstadt and Anthony Forbes Watson, head of her publisher,
Penguin Books, arrive at London's High Court Tuesday to
defend against charges brought by historian David Irving
(above). / MAX NASH / Associated Press
***
American professor and historian of the Holocaust
By
01/12/2000
The Guardian
Copyright (C) 2000 The Guardian; Source: World Reporter (TM)
Deborah E Lipstadt
Education
City College, New York. Brandeis University, Boston.
Career
Has taught at UCLA and Occidental College, Los Angeles.
Currently Dorot Associate Professor of Modern Jewish and
Holocaust Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
In 1994 President Clinton appointed her to serve on the
United States holocaust memorial council.
Member of the American advisory committee on religious
freedom abroad since 1996.
Books
Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the
Holocaust (1986), Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault
on Truth and Memory (1993).
Research: Sally James
***
'Pariah' Irving sues Holocaust author: Historian labelled a
liar over his views on fate of Jews says attack on his
reputation robbed him of financial security
VIKRAM DODD
01/12/2000
The Guardian
Copyright (C) 2000 The Guardian; Source: World Reporter (TM)
Vikram Dodd
The alleged Nazi apologist David Irving branded survivors of
the Auschwitz death camp with the acronym 'ASSHOLS' and
denied the Holocaust happened, the high court heard
yesterday.
Mr Irving was condemned as a liar and 'falsifier of history'
as the most emotive libel trial for a generation began.
The controversial historian is suing over a book which said
he denied the Holocaust as a historical fact, and wilfully
manipulated and distorted history.
Mr Irving issued a libel writ against the American academic
Deborah Lipstadt , author of Denying the Holocaust: the
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, and its publisher
Penguin books.
The defendants say the accusations against Mr Irving, 62,
are justified and deny libel.
Opening his case Mr Irving said the book stemmed from 'an
organised international endeavour' to vandalise his
reputation which had led to him being shunned by leading
publishers. He claimed that the 'waves of hatred' following
the book had robbed him and his four children of their
future financial security.
Richard Rampton QC, for Professor Lipstadt and Penguin,
savaged Mr Irving. He quoted a 1991 speech in which Mr
Irving allegedly rubbished the idea that the Auschwitz camp
existed to murder Jews.
'I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz,' Mr
Irving said, according to Mr Rampton. 'It's baloney, it's a
legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave
labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large
numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why
believe the rest of the baloney?
'I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on
the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than
ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.
'Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are
so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number
increases as the years go past, which is biologically very
odd to say the least. I'm going to form an association of
Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and other
liars, or the ASSHOLS.'
In the same speech in Calgary, Canada, said Mr Rampton, Mr
Irving complained about Jewish protests at his being granted
a platform and is alleged to have said: 'And it's happening
now. They're zeroing in on the university [saying] 'Nazism
not welcome here. Self-professed moderate fascist' - I
strongly object to that word 'moderate'.'
There was standing room only at court 37 at the high court
in London.
Mr Irving is representing himself in the trial, expected to
last around three months and being heard without a jury
because of the complexity of the evidence. He sat
impassively as the defence detailed alleged falsehoods from
his books about the second world war.
Mr Rampton said: 'Mr Irving calls him self a historian. The
truth is, however, that he is not a historian at all, but a
falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar.
'Lies take many forms but in the end all forms of lying
converge into a single definition: wilful, deliberate mis-
statement of the facts.
'Moreover, the lies which the defendants in this case will
show that Mr Irving has told concern an area of history in
which, perhaps, it behoves any writer or researcher to be
particularly careful of the truth: the destruction of the
Jews by the Nazis during world war two - the Holocaust - and
Adolf Hitler's role in that human catastrophe.'
Mr Rampton continued: 'Mr Irving is nowadays a Holocaust
denier. By this I mean that he denies that the Nazis planned
and carried out the systematic murder of millions of Jews,
in particular - though by no means exclusively - by the use
of homicidal gas chambers, and in particular - though by no
means exclusively - at Auschwitz in southern Poland.'
Mr Rampton said the tell tale evidence of Mr Irving's
attitudes were that he addressed audiences that often
consisted of 'radical right-wing, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi
groups of people'.
Mr Rampton said the case was not primarily about whether the
Holocaust occurred or Hitler's complicity: 'the essence of
the case is Mr Irving's honesty and integrity as a
chronicler - I shy away from the word historian - of these
matters.
'For if it be right that Mr Irving, driven by his extremist
views and sympathies, has devoted his energies to the
deliberate falsification of this tragic episode in history,
then, by exposing that dangerous fraud in this court, the
defence may properly be applauded for having performed a
significant public service.'
Mr Irving likened the charge that he was a Holocaust denier
to 'a yellow verbal star'.
In the book Professor Lipstadt had branded Irving as one of
the most prominent and dangerous Holocaust deniers.
He said: 'The word 'Holocaust' is an artificial label
commonly attached to one of the greatest and still most
unexplained tragedies of this past century.'
He said Professor Lipstadt had used the phrase 'Holocaust
denier' repeatedly and took pride in coining it.
'Meaningless though it is, the phrase has become a part of
the English language. It is a poison to which there is
virtually no antidote, less lethal than a hypodermic with
nerve gas jabbed in the neck, but deadly all the same: for
the chosen victim, it is like being called a wife-beater or
a paedophile.
'It is enough for the label to be attached, for the attachee
to find himself designated as a pariah.'
Mr Irving, 62, opened his claim for damages in a speech
where at times his voice broke with emotion. Sometimes
slapping the table in front of him, he said far from denying
the slaughter of Jews he had unearthed documents revealing
new aspects of the Holocaust.
Mr Irving told Mr Justice Gray: 'By virtue of the activities
of the defendants I have since 1996 seen one fearful
publisher after another falling away from me, declining to
reprint my works, refusing to accept new commissions and
turning their backs on me when I approach.
'Such is the nature of the odium that has been generated by
the waves of hatred recklessly propagated against me by the
defendants.'
He told the court that the book had slashed his earnings
which once reached pounds 100,000 a year from his writing.
Mr Irving said that for Professor Lipstadt to win the case
and justify the charges of manipulation and distortion, she
would have to show that 'I knew what happened; and that I
perversely and deliberately portrayed it differently from
how I knew it to have happened'.
Mr Irving condemned laws in Germany aimed at protecting the
memory of the Holocaust: 'Some good friends of mine are
sitting at this very moment in German prisons' after
questioning the scale, system and numbers of dead.
He said he felt no 'shame' that he himself was fined in
Germany under these laws for saying the gas chamber at
Auschwitz seen by tourists 'is a fake built by the Poles
after the war, just like the one established by the
Americans at Dachau'.
'Fifty years on,' said Mr Irving, 'it has become a criminal
offence to question whether Nuremberg [war crimes trials]
got it right. History is to be as defined by the four
victorious powers.'
Mr Irving is the author of Hitler's War and Goebbels:
Mastermind of the Third Reich. The case continues.
***
Foreign Desk; Section A
London Trial Opens Dispute On Rewriting The Holocaust
By SARAH LYALL
01/12/2000
The New York Times
Page 7, Column 1
c. 2000 New York Times Company
LONDON, Jan. 11 -- ''I have no intentions, and neither is it
the purpose of this trial, to refight World War II.'' So
declared the revisionist historian David Irving in his
impassioned opening statement in High Court here today, on
the first day of the libel case that he hopes will salvage
his reputation.
But in a way, World War II is exactly what the case --
Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd. and Lipstadt -- is about.
Mr. Irving -- who has said, among other things, that Hitler
did not approve the mass killing of Jews during the war and
that Auschwitz was merely a brutal labor camp with an
unfortunately high death rate --is suing Deborah Lipstadt ,
the author of ''Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault
on Truth and Memory,'' and her British publisher, Penguin.
His main claim is that his reputation has been irrevocably
damaged by the book's assertions that he is a Holocaust
denier who manipulates history to serve his own ends.
It is a case about free speech and historical methods, and
about, peripherally, the magnitude and circumstances of the
Holocaust. It is being closely watched outside of Britain,
including in the United States, where Ms. Lipstadt holds the
Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory
University in Atlanta.
''It's almost inevitable that the major focus of the case
will be the crimes of the Holocaust, and whether they took
place, and how they're interpreted,'' Efraim Zuroff,
director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
in Jerusalem, said in an interview. ''Any victory for Irving
is a loss for historical justice.''
The case arises from Ms. Lipstadt 's book, first published
in the United States in 1993, which examined Holocaust
deniers and their connections to a worldwide network of
right-wing and neo-Nazi groups. In the book, published in
Britain by Penguin in 1994, Ms. Lipstadt charged that Mr.
Irving, the author of more than 30 books on the Nazi era,
was ''one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust
denial'' and a researcher who ''bends'' historical evidence
''until it conforms with his ideological leanings and
political agenda.''
Mr. Irving brought the case, he said, because Ms. Lipstadt
and Penguin, supported by ''an organized international
endeavor,'' set about to destroy his career. As a result, he
said, St. Martin's Press withdrew his 1996 biography of the
Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels, which contends that
Goebbels, not Hitler, was behind the murder of the Jews.
''I have since 1996 seen one fearful publisher after another
falling away from me, declining to reprint my works,
refusing to accept new commissions and turning their backs
on me when I approach,'' said Mr. Irving, who is
representing himself.
He insisted that he was not a Holocaust denier, although he
has disputed standard accounts of how many people died and
under what circumstances. ''No person in full command of his
mental faculties, and with even the slightest understanding
of what happened in World War II, can deny that the tragedy
actually happened, however much we dissident historians may
wish to quibble about the means, the scale, the dates and
other minutiae,'' he said.
Mr. Irving has had a curious career. Some of his works,
especially ''Hitler's War'' (1977), have earned high praise
from some reviewers for the elegance of his writing and
thoroughness of his research. But in recent years, more and
more questions have been raised about his methods and
ideology. In the United States, Publisher's Weekly called
his Goebbels biography ''repellant.'' In 1992, Mr. Irving
was convicted and fined by a court in Germany, where
Holocaust denial is a crime, after saying publicly that
there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz. He has also been
banned from Canada, Italy, Austria and Australia.
Because of his early reputation as a formidable historian,
Mr. Irving has confounded efforts to write him off as a
simple crackpot. Gitta Sereny, the Nazi-era historian who is
involved in a lawsuit filed by Mr. Irving after she wrote
that he was a ''brilliant propagandist'' made ''dangerous''
by his ''clever mixture of truth and untruth,'' said in an
interview that it was hard for readers to know just how much
he distorts the facts.
Richard Rampton, the lawyer arguing on behalf of Ms.
Lipstadt and Penguin, charged that Mr. Irving was not a
historian at all. ''To put it bluntly, he is a liar,'' Mr.
Rampton said in court.
''The essence of the case is Mr. Irving's honesty and
integrity as a chronicler -- I shy away from the word
'historian' -- of these matters,'' Mr. Rampton said. ''By
exposing that dangerous fraud in this court, the defendants
may properly be applauded for having performed a significant
public service, not just in this country, but in all those
places in the world were anti-Semitism is waiting to be
fed.''
***
Historian or plain liar?
01/12/2000
The Express
Copyright (C) 2000 The Express; Source: World Reporter (TM)
Right-wing historian David Irving was branded a liar
yesterday as he was accused of"falsifying" history to deny
the Holocaust. He was accused, in court, of deceit over the
Nazi murder of millions of Jews in World War Two and Adolf
Hitler's role in it.
Mr Irving, 62, was launching a libel action against Penguin
Books and author Deborah Lipstadt . He said they were part
of "an organised international endeavour" determined to
destroy his career and "vandalise" his legitimacy as a
historian.
But Richard Rampton QC, counsel for Penguin and Professor
Lipstadt , said: "Mr Irving calls himself an historian. The
truth is, however, that he is not an historian at all, but a
falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar.
"Mr Irving has used many different means to falsify history:
invention, misquotation, suppression, distortion,
manipulation and, not least, mistranslation.
"But all these techniques have the same ultimate effect -
falsification of the truth." He said Mr Irving had lied
about the destruction of the Jews during World War Two.
"Mr Irving is nowadays a Holocaust denier. By this I mean
that he denies that the Nazis planned and carried out the
systematic murder of millions of Jews, in particular, though
by no means exclusively, the use of homicidal gas chambers,
and in particular, though by no means exclusively, at
Auschwitz in southern Poland."
He told the High Court in London that Mr Irving's campaign
was determined to "sink the Battleship Auschwitz," thereby
showing that the mass extermination was a "lie deployed by
Jews to blackmail the German people into paying vast sums in
reparations to supposed victims of the Holocaust."
He said Mr Irving often spoke to groups of radical Right-
wingers, neo-Nazis, white supremacist organisations, and the
British National Party. Mr Rampton quoted Mr Irving as
saying: "More women died on the back seat of Edward
Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas
chamber in Auschwitz." He was referring to the 1969 US
scandal when passenger Mary Jo Kopechne died in an accident
in the senator's car.
Mr Irving, the author of Hitler's War and Goebbels:
Mastermind Of The Third Reich, told the court that Professor
Lipstadt 's book about the Holocaust and its publishers had
generated "waves of hatred" against him.
He said that he had always looked on his books as his
pension fund and a legacy for his four children, but that
was no longer the situation. "By virtue of the activities of
the defendants I have since 1996 seen one fearful publisher
after another falling away from me, declining to reprint my
works, refusing to accept new commissions and turning their
backs on me when I approach," he told Mr Justice Gray, who
is hearing the 12-week case without a jury.
He added: "Such is the nature of the odium that has been
generated by the waves of hatred recklessly propagated
against me by the defendants. In short my 'pension' has
vanished, as assuredly as if I had been employed by one of
those companies taken over by the late Mr Robert Maxwell."
He said he would not have faced "this hatred" if World War
Two, and in particular the Third Reich and its "criminal
leadership", had not been his area of expertise.
Mr Irving claims he has been libelled in Professor Lipstadt
's 1994 book, Denying The Holocaust: The Growing Assault On
Truth And Memory.
He says that it alleges that he has distorted statistics and
documents to serve his own ideological purposes and reach
historically untenable conclusions, and has knowingly
consorted with extremists.
Mr Irving, who is representing himself, said that the phrase
"Holocaust denier" had become "one of the most potent
phrases in the arsenal of insult".
"The word 'denier' is particularly evil because no person in
full command of his mental faculties, and with even the
slightest understanding of what happened in World War Two,
can deny that the tragedy actually happened." Dissident
historians, though, "may wish to quibble about the means,
the scale, the dates and other minutiae".
Penguin and Ms Lipstadt , professor of modern Jewish and
Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia,
deny libel and plead justification.The case continues.
***
Copyright 2000 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London)
January 12, 2000, Wednesday London Edition 2
HEADLINE: NATIONAL NEWS: Writer's action raises thorny
questions LIBEL HEARING
HISTORIAN SUES PUBLISHER AND US PROFESSOR OVER CLAIMS OF
DENYING HOLOCAUST:
BY: By JOHN MASON
BODY:
The long-awaited libel action between Penguin Books, the
international publishers, and David Irving, the
controversial second world war historian, over his version
of the Holocaust, began yesterday in the High Court.
The case will raise thorny issues such as: when are the
ideas of historians or academics so appalling their work
should be forever banned? Other issues include whether, or
where, one limits free speech. And what makes a good
historian anyway, especially when their subject is the most
emotive in 20th century history?
These apparently intractable ethical issues will, to some
extent, now be decided by a single judge, Mr Justice Gray.
The international publishing industry, with its commercial
interests, will be watching attentively.
David Irving, the historian of Hitler and other Nazi-related
subjects, accused Penguin Books and US author Prof Deborah
Lipstadt, of being part of an "organised international
endeavour" to destroy his reputation as a historian by
accusing him of distorting history and denying the Holocaust
took place.
"The word denyer is particularly evil because no person in
full command of their faculties with even the slightest
understanding of what happened in world war two can deny
that the tragedy actually happened, however much we
dissident historians may wish to quibble about the means,
the scale, the dates and other minutiae," he said.
Mr Irving is suing both Prof Lipstadt and Penguin (a
subsidiary of Pearson, the media group that also owns the
Financial Times), for damages over their claims. He is also
seeking an injunction to prevent further publication of the
allegations in Prof Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust.
Representing himself in court, Mr Irving claimed both
Penguin and Prof Lipstadt were "villains" who were part of
an internationally organised attempt to ruin his reputation.
Mr Irving said his books had been previously published by a
number of reputable publishers, including Penguin itself,
Macmillan and Simon and Schuster. However, as a result of
Penguin's allegations, leading publishers such as St
Martin's Press now refused to publish his work.
Richard Rampton QC, for Penguin, said: "Mr Irving calls
himself a historian. The truth is, however, that he is not a
historian at all, but a falsifier of history. To put it
bluntly, he is a liar."
Accusing Mr Irving of using disreputable methods, Mr Rampton
insisted he was a "Holocaust denyer", saying: "By this I
mean that he denies that the Nazis planned and carried out
the systematic murder or millions of Jews, in particular -
though by no means exclusively - by the use of homicidal gas
chambers and in particular at Auschwitz in southern Poland."
The case is due to last three months.
###
All British press edition for 12 January 2000
Irving is a falsifier and a liar, says publisher Irving
tells court of `verbal Yellow Star'
Ian Burrell Home Affairs Correspondent
01/12/2000
The Independent - London
FOREIGN
Page 10
(Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC)
THE RIGHT-WING historian David Irving was described
yesterday as a "falsifier of history" and a "liar" at the
start of a High Court libel battle.
In a packed court, Richard Rampton QC, representing Penguin
Books, said: "Mr Irving calls himself an historian. The
truth is, however, that he is not an historian at all, but a
falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar. Mr
Irving has used many different means to falsify history:
invention, misquotation, suppression, distortion,
manipulation and - not least - mistranslation. But all these
techniques have the same ultimate effect: falsification of
the truth."
The historian is suing the publisher and the American author
Deborah Lipstadt over her book, Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, in which she describes
Mr Irving as a "Holocaust denier". Mr Rampton repeated the
allegation.
He said: "By this I mean that he denies that the Nazis
planned and carried out the systematic murder of millions of
Jews, in particular - though by no means exclusively - by
the use of homicidal gas chambers, and in particular -
though by no means exclusively - at Auschwitz in southern
Poland."
But Mr Irving told the court that he he had never denied the
existence of the Holocaust. He said: "No person in full
command of his mental faculties and with even the slightest
understanding of what happened in World War Two can deny
that the tragedy actually happened, however much we
dissident historians may wish to quibble about the means,
the scale, the dates and other minutiae."
Mr Irving said the tag "Holocaust denier" had become "one of
the most potent phrases in the arsenal of insult". He
described the expression as "a verbal Yellow Star".
Mr Irving, 61, who has been banned from at least five
countries because of his views, told the court he had never
claimed any specialist knowledge of the Holocaust. He said:
"If I am an expert in anything at all, I may be so immodest
as to submit that it is in the role that Adolf Hitler played
in the propagation of World War Two."
Mr Irving, who is representing himself, said the Holocaust
should not be the focus of the libel case, which is expected
to last three months. "What is moot here is not what
happened in those sites of atrocities - but what happened
over the last 32 years, on my writing desk in my apartment
off Grosvenor Square," he said. "This inquiry should not
leave the four walls of my study."
Mr Irving said publishers were afraid to be associated with
him: "I have since 1996 seen one fearful publisher after
another falling away from me, declining to reprint my works,
refusing to accept new commissions and turning their backs
on me when I approach."
The historian claimed that Ms Lipstadt and Penguin were part
of an "organised international endeavour" to "destroy my
career and to vandalise my legitimacy as an historian".
Mr Rampton suggested that Mr Irving used distorted history
"in pursuit of his exoneration of Adolf Hitler and his
denial of the Holocaust". He said the historian often gave
talks to "radical right- wing, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi
groups". During a speech in Canada in 1991, Mr Rampton said
Mr Irving had said aboutAuschwitz: "Once we admit the fact
that it was a brutal slave labour camp and large numbers of
people did die, as large numbers of innocent people died
elsewhere in the war, why believe the rest of the baloney?"
***
News
A war between historians that may never end
Boyd Tonkin
01/12/2000
The Independent - London
FOREIGN
Page 10
(Copyright 2000 Newspaper Publishing PLC)
ANYONE WHO saw Schindler's List will remember the closing
scene, in which each of the surviving Schindlerjuden places
a stone on his or her rescuer's memorial. Some do look old
and frail; others, remarkably trim and vigorous. The
literature of the Holocaust continues to arouse such passion
and polemic in large part because it still relates to living
memory. Many children, after all, were dispatched to the
extermination camps. Some who came through that torment will
only recently have reached retirement age.
This history is alive, and it kicks. Hence any apparent
assault on the agreed version puts into question not just an
academic consensus, but the integrity of living people.
"Though denial of the Holocaust may be an attack on the
history of the annihilation of the Jews," wrote the
historian Deborah Lipstadt in the 1993 book that David
Irving now disputes, "at its core it poses a threat to all
who believe that knowledge and memory are among the
keystones of our civilisation."
That knowledge, and those memories, still service a
flourishing literature of witness - a genre that only
emerged in the 1970s, with such figures as Primo Levi and
Jean Amery, after two decades of postwar silence. Even in
1999, important new additions were arriving: the painstaking
diaries of Victor Klemperer, for instance, one of the few
German Jews who survived life under the Third Reich. Roman
Frister's memoir The Cap told how one young camp inmate
bought his own life at the cost of another's death. And next
month will see the publication of a posthumous autobiography
by the much-loved rabbi and Auschwitz survivor Hugo Gryn.
Not surprisingly, this torrent of testimony has carried in
its wake one or two outright frauds. Last year the pathetic
story of Binyaminn Wilkomirski, who falsely claimed to have
spent his childhood in the camps, finally came to light. He
would weep when he recounted his "ordeal", one sceptic
noted; genuine survivors never can.
Such rare cases of exploitation have prompted some experts
to wonder whether the state-approved culture of Holocaust
reminiscence may end up doing more harm than good.
This year, two American Jewish historians are due to publish
challenges to what one cynic has dubbed "Shoah business".
Peter Novick's The Holocaust and Collective Memory will ask
whether in effect it hands Hitler an ultimate victory.
Norman Finkelstein, in The Holocaust Industry, will argue
that the memorial cult insults the victims of Nazism more
than "the rubbish of Holocaust deniers" does.
The other side of this story concerns not that flagrant,
truth- mocking "rubbish", but the revival of a kind of
German patriotism in historical accounts of the Second World
War. David Irving himself has acted as chief English-
language standard-bearer for this movement. In the 1980s a
group of German historians - a few veterans, but many from
the younger postwar generation - began to "normalise"
accounts of military and civilian life under the Third
Reich. In the confident era of reunification, a tone of
impatience with the burden of collective guilt crept into
many studies.
Ordinary Germans began to emerge more as victims than
villains. So a writer such as Andreas Hillgruber could hint
at a comparison between the suffering endured by Wehrmacht
soldiers in the East and the mass persecutions committed by
the Germans themselves. A bitter "historians' war" erupted
between the "revisionists" and those who refused to let
attention shift from the enormity of Nazi crimes. This was
the background to the intensely divisive book by the United
States historian Daniel Goldhagen, who asserted most of
those decent, hard-pressed normal Germans were in fact
enthusiastic anti- Semites, and "Hitler's willing
executioners".
Oddly enough, the revisionist readings of the Reich came to
the fore just as it grew clear that the senior Nazi who most
successfully maintained his innocence had eventually
accepted his complicity in genocide. In 1995 Gitta Sereny
published Albert Speer: his battle with truth - the final
fruit of herinterviews with Hitler's pet architect and
minister for war production, who spent 20 years in Spandau
jail. At last, we learnt that the "good Nazi" had in the end
acknowledged his awareness of the Holocaust.
"My chief guilt," Speer wrote in 1977, was "my tacit
acceptance of the persecution and murder of millions of
Jews." He admitted that to the Jewish Board of Deputies in
South Africa, which had sought his support in banning the
notorious Holocaust-denial pamphlet "Did Six Million Die?"
If Speer had said as much at the Nuremberg trial, he would
undoubtedly have been hanged.
***
History of the Holocaust goes on trial: Author sues for
libel over book he says made him an international pariah and
threatened his livelihood. Neil Tweedie reports
Neil Tweedie
01/12/2000
The Daily Telegraph
Page 05
Copyright (C) 2000 The Daily Telegraph; Source: World
Reporter (TM)
The historian
THE controversial British historian David Irving claimed he
was the victim of an "organised international endeavour" to
destroy his career at the opening of a libel trial in London
yesterday.
Mr Irving is suing Prof Deborah Lipstadt , an American
author, and her publishers over claims in her latest book -
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory - that he is one of the most prominent and dangerous
"Holocaust deniers" in the world.
Mr Irving, 62, is conducting his own case. In his opening
address he told Mr Justice Gray that his livelihood and that
of his family had been put in jeopardy.
He said: "By virtue of the activities of the defendants and
those who funded her and guided her hand, I have since 1996
seen one fearful publisher after another falling away from
me, declining to reprint my works, refusing to accept new
commissions and turning their backs on me when I approach."
He said being described as a "Holocaust denier" was "like
being called a wife-beater or a paedophile".
Mr Irving told the judge, who is is sitting without a jury,
that far from being a "Holocaust denier", he had repeatedly
brought attention to major aspects of the Holocaust through
his discovery of fresh documents from the Second World War.
He had been the victim of a concerted attack on his
character and work by an international network of Left-
wingers and Jews who had succeeded in making him a "pariah".
Mr Irving said it was not his intention in bringing the case
to reopen the debate over the Holocaust. He had sued Miss
Lipstadt because she had accused him of "manipulation and
distortion", something he vehemently denied.
"Holocaust denier" was, said Mr Irving, a particularly evil
phrase because no one could deny what had happened in the
war. Dissident historians were merely quibbling about dates,
scale and other "minutiae".
"It is enough for the label to be attached, for the attachee
to find himself designated as a pariah, an outcast from
normal society. It is a verbal Yellow Star [of David]."
He denied he was anti-Semitic, citing his friendship with
Jewish people from his schooldays. He numbered the publisher
George Weidenfeld among his friends.
Mr Irving, the author of Hitler's War and Goebbels:
Mastermind of the Third Reich, said Miss Lipstadt and
Penguin Books were part of "an organised international
endeavour" determined to destroy his career and "vandalise"
his legitimacy as a historian. He said that he had always
looked on his books as his pension fund and a legacy for his
four children, but that was no longer the situation.
Because of "the nature of the odium that has been generated
by the waves of hatred recklessly propagated against me by
the defendants" his "pension" had vanished "as assuredly as
if I had been employed by one of those companies taken over
by the late Mr Robert Maxwell".
Mr Irving claims that Miss Lipstadt 's book alleges that he
has denied the Holocaust, has distorted statistics and
documents to serve his own ideological purposes and to reach
historically untenable conclusions, and that he has
knowingly consorted with extremists. Penguin and Miss
Lipstadt , the holder of the Dorot Chair in Modern Jewish
and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta,
Georgia, deny libel and plead justification.
They claim that Mr Irving has denied both the Holocaust and
that gas chambers were used to carry it out, and that he
holds extremist views and distorts history.
Mr Irving said that he had never held himself out to be a
Holocaust expert and had not written books about it.
If he was an expert on anything it was the role that Hitler
played in the war. "As a peripheral matter to that topic, on
which I have written a number of books, I inevitably
investigated the extent to which Hitler participated in or
had cognisance of the Holocaust. That was the sum total of
my involvement as a book author up to the launching of these
writs."
He said that he intended to show that "far from being a
Holocaust denier" he had repeatedly drawn attention to major
aspects of the Holocaust and had provided historical
documents to scholars and the public of which they had been
previously unaware.
"I submit that, harsh though it may seem, the court should
take no interest in that tragedy [the Holocaust]." What was
at stake was not what happened in Poland or Russia 50 years
ago, but over the last 32 years "on my writing desk in my
apartment off Grosvenor Square".
He said that to justify her allegations it was not enough
for Miss Lipstadt to show that he had misrepresented what
happened but that he knew what happened and "perversely and
deliberately" portrayed it differently.
Mr Irving said that he once earned more than pounds 100,000
a year in royalties but had been done "very real pecuniary
damage" by the defendants.
He said Denying the Holocaust purported to be "a scholarly
investigation of the operations of an international network
conspiracy of people whom the second defendant [Miss
Lipstadt ] has dubbed `Holocaust deniers'. It is not."
Holocaust deniers "has become one of the most potent phrases
in the arsenal of insult, replacing the N-word, the F-word,
and a whole alphabet of other slurs . . ." Mr Irving added.
The judge would undoubtedly hear from the defendants, he
said, that he was fined a very substantial sum of money by
the German Government.
"It is no matter for shame for me, although it has had
catastrophic consequences, as it now makes me de facto `a
convict', with a criminal record and as such liable to a
concatenation of further indignities and sanctions in every
foreign country which I now wish to visit."
It arose from a remark made during an address he made to an
audience in Munich in 1990 - "We now know that the gas
chamber shown to the tourists at Auschwitz is a fake built
by the Poles after the war, just like the one established by
the Americans at Dachau." Mr Irving added: "This may well
raise eyebrows. It might be found to be offensive by
sections of the community and if they take such offence, I
can assure this court that I regret it and that such was not
my intention.
"These remarks were true; the Poles admitted it in January
1995 and under English law truth has always been regarded as
an absolute defence."
Mr Irving continued: "We shall hear, indeed from the
defence's own expert witnesses - though perhaps the
admission will have to be bludgeoned out of them - that the
gas chamber shown to the tourists at Auschwitz was indeed
built by the Polish communists three years after the war was
over."
The hearing continues.
The accuser
DEBORAH Lipstadt , Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust
Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, accused David Irving
of being a liar who systematically suppressed, distorted and
manipulated history in an attempt to deny the existence of
the Holocaust.
In Denying the Holocaust, she claims that he is one of the
most prominent "Holocaust deniers". His mastery of
historical documents makes him a particularly dangerous
exponent of the claim, shared by neo-fascist and some Muslim
fundamentalist groups, she says.
Yesterday her counsel, Richard Rampton, QC, who also
represents her publishers Penguin Books, told the court: "Mr
Irving calls himself a historian. The truth is, however,
that he is a falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is
a liar.
"Lies may take various forms . . . but in the end all forms
of lying converge into a single definition: wilful,
deliberate misstatement of the facts. Mr Irving has used
many different means to falsify history: invention,
misquotation, suppression, distortion, manipulation and -
not least - mistranslation."
Mr Rampton said Mr Irving's character could be judged by
those he associated with: neo-Nazis, American white
supremacists and the British National Party.
He quoted a speech in which Mr Irving said that Auschwitz
was merely a slave labour camp where large numbers of people
happened to die from overwork, disease and starvation.
Mr Irving said at Calgary, Alberta, in September 1991: "I
don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz. It's
baloney, it's a legend.
"I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on
the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than
ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.
"Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are
so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number
increases as the years go past, which is biologically very
odd. Because I'm going to form an Association of Auschwitz
survivors, survivors of the Holocaust and other liars, or
the ASSHOLS."
Mr Rampton concluded: "This is obviously an important case.
The essence of it is Mr Irving's honesty and integrity as a
chronicler - I shy away from the word `historian' - of these
matters.
"For if it be right that Mr Irving, driven by his extremist
views, has devoted his energies to the deliberate
falsification of this tragic episode in history, then, by
exposing that dangerous fraud in this court, the defendants
may properly be applauded for having performed a significant
public service."
***
American professor and historian of the Holocaust
By
01/12/2000
The Guardian
Copyright (C) 2000 The Guardian; Source: World Reporter (TM)
Deborah E Lipstadt
Education
City College, New York. Brandeis University, Boston.
Career
Has taught at UCLA and Occidental College, Los Angeles.
Currently Dorot Associate Professor of Modern Jewish and
Holocaust Studies, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
In 1994 President Clinton appointed her to serve on the
United States holocaust memorial council.
Member of the American advisory committee on religious
freedom abroad since 1996.
Books
Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the
Holocaust (1986), Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault
on Truth and Memory (1993).
Research: Sally James
***
'Pariah' Irving sues Holocaust author: Historian labelled a
liar over his views on fate of Jews says attack on his
reputation robbed him of financial security
VIKRAM DODD
01/12/2000
The Guardian
Copyright (C) 2000 The Guardian; Source: World Reporter (TM)
Vikram Dodd
The alleged Nazi apologist David Irving branded survivors of
the Auschwitz death camp with the acronym 'ASSHOLS' and
denied the Holocaust happened, the high court heard
yesterday.
Mr Irving was condemned as a liar and 'falsifier of history'
as the most emotive libel trial for a generation began.
The controversial historian is suing over a book which said
he denied the Holocaust as a historical fact, and wilfully
manipulated and distorted history.
Mr Irving issued a libel writ against the American academic
Deborah Lipstadt , author of Denying the Holocaust: the
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, and its publisher
Penguin books.
The defendants say the accusations against Mr Irving, 62,
are justified and deny libel.
Opening his case Mr Irving said the book stemmed from 'an
organised international endeavour' to vandalise his
reputation which had led to him being shunned by leading
publishers. He claimed that the 'waves of hatred' following
the book had robbed him and his four children of their
future financial security.
Richard Rampton QC, for Professor Lipstadt and Penguin,
savaged Mr Irving. He quoted a 1991 speech in which Mr
Irving allegedly rubbished the idea that the Auschwitz camp
existed to murder Jews.
'I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz,' Mr
Irving said, according to Mr Rampton. 'It's baloney, it's a
legend. Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave
labour camp and large numbers of people did die, as large
numbers of innocent people died elsewhere in the war, why
believe the rest of the baloney?
'I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on
the back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than
ever died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz.
'Oh, you think that's tasteless, how about this? There are
so many Auschwitz survivors going around, in fact the number
increases as the years go past, which is biologically very
odd to say the least. I'm going to form an association of
Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and other
liars, or the ASSHOLS.'
In the same speech in Calgary, Canada, said Mr Rampton, Mr
Irving complained about Jewish protests at his being granted
a platform and is alleged to have said: 'And it's happening
now. They're zeroing in on the university [saying] 'Nazism
not welcome here. Self-professed moderate fascist' - I
strongly object to that word 'moderate'.'
There was standing room only at court 37 at the high court
in London.
Mr Irving is representing himself in the trial, expected to
last around three months and being heard without a jury
because of the complexity of the evidence. He sat
impassively as the defence detailed alleged falsehoods from
his books about the second world war.
Mr Rampton said: 'Mr Irving calls him self a historian. The
truth is, however, that he is not a historian at all, but a
falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar.
'Lies take many forms but in the end all forms of lying
converge into a single definition: wilful, deliberate mis-
statement of the facts.
'Moreover, the lies which the defendants in this case will
show that Mr Irving has told concern an area of history in
which, perhaps, it behoves any writer or researcher to be
particularly careful of the truth: the destruction of the
Jews by the Nazis during world war two - the Holocaust - and
Adolf Hitler's role in that human catastrophe.'
Mr Rampton continued: 'Mr Irving is nowadays a Holocaust
denier. By this I mean that he denies that the Nazis planned
and carried out the systematic murder of millions of Jews,
in particular - though by no means exclusively - by the use
of homicidal gas chambers, and in particular - though by no
means exclusively - at Auschwitz in southern Poland.'
Mr Rampton said the tell tale evidence of Mr Irving's
attitudes were that he addressed audiences that often
consisted of 'radical right-wing, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi
groups of people'.
Mr Rampton said the case was not primarily about whether the
Holocaust occurred or Hitler's complicity: 'the essence of
the case is Mr Irving's honesty and integrity as a
chronicler - I shy away from the word historian - of these
matters.
'For if it be right that Mr Irving, driven by his extremist
views and sympathies, has devoted his energies to the
deliberate falsification of this tragic episode in history,
then, by exposing that dangerous fraud in this court, the
defence may properly be applauded for having performed a
significant public service.'
Mr Irving likened the charge that he was a Holocaust denier
to 'a yellow verbal star'.
In the book Professor Lipstadt had branded Irving as one of
the most prominent and dangerous Holocaust deniers.
He said: 'The word 'Holocaust' is an artificial label
commonly attached to one of the greatest and still most
unexplained tragedies of this past century.'
He said Professor Lipstadt had used the phrase 'Holocaust
denier' repeatedly and took pride in coining it.
'Meaningless though it is, the phrase has become a part of
the English language. It is a poison to which there is
virtually no antidote, less lethal than a hypodermic with
nerve gas jabbed in the neck, but deadly all the same: for
the chosen victim, it is like being called a wife-beater or
a paedophile.
'It is enough for the label to be attached, for the attachee
to find himself designated as a pariah.'
Mr Irving, 62, opened his claim for damages in a speech
where at times his voice broke with emotion. Sometimes
slapping the table in front of him, he said far from denying
the slaughter of Jews he had unearthed documents revealing
new aspects of the Holocaust.
Mr Irving told Mr Justice Gray: 'By virtue of the activities
of the defendants I have since 1996 seen one fearful
publisher after another falling away from me, declining to
reprint my works, refusing to accept new commissions and
turning their backs on me when I approach.
'Such is the nature of the odium that has been generated by
the waves of hatred recklessly propagated against me by the
defendants.'
He told the court that the book had slashed his earnings
which once reached pounds 100,000 a year from his writing.
Mr Irving said that for Professor Lipstadt to win the case
and justify the charges of manipulation and distortion, she
would have to show that 'I knew what happened; and that I
perversely and deliberately portrayed it differently from
how I knew it to have happened'.
Mr Irving condemned laws in Germany aimed at protecting the
memory of the Holocaust: 'Some good friends of mine are
sitting at this very moment in German prisons' after
questioning the scale, system and numbers of dead.
He said he felt no 'shame' that he himself was fined in
Germany under these laws for saying the gas chamber at
Auschwitz seen by tourists 'is a fake built by the Poles
after the war, just like the one established by the
Americans at Dachau'.
'Fifty years on,' said Mr Irving, 'it has become a criminal
offence to question whether Nuremberg [war crimes trials]
got it right. History is to be as defined by the four
victorious powers.'
Mr Irving is the author of Hitler's War and Goebbels:
Mastermind of the Third Reich. The case continues.
***
Historian or plain liar?
01/12/2000
The Express
Copyright (C) 2000 The Express; Source: World Reporter (TM)
Right-wing historian David Irving was branded a liar
yesterday as he was accused of"falsifying" history to deny
the Holocaust. He was accused, in court, of deceit over the
Nazi murder of millions of Jews in World War Two and Adolf
Hitler's role in it.
Mr Irving, 62, was launching a libel action against Penguin
Books and author Deborah Lipstadt . He said they were part
of "an organised international endeavour" determined to
destroy his career and "vandalise" his legitimacy as a
historian.
But Richard Rampton QC, counsel for Penguin and Professor
Lipstadt , said: "Mr Irving calls himself an historian. The
truth is, however, that he is not an historian at all, but a
falsifier of history. To put it bluntly, he is a liar.
"Mr Irving has used many different means to falsify history:
invention, misquotation, suppression, distortion,
manipulation and, not least, mistranslation.
"But all these techniques have the same ultimate effect -
falsification of the truth." He said Mr Irving had lied
about the destruction of the Jews during World War Two.
"Mr Irving is nowadays a Holocaust denier. By this I mean
that he denies that the Nazis planned and carried out the
systematic murder of millions of Jews, in particular, though
by no means exclusively, the use of homicidal gas chambers,
and in particular, though by no means exclusively, at
Auschwitz in southern Poland."
He told the High Court in London that Mr Irving's campaign
was determined to "sink the Battleship Auschwitz," thereby
showing that the mass extermination was a "lie deployed by
Jews to blackmail the German people into paying vast sums in
reparations to supposed victims of the Holocaust."
He said Mr Irving often spoke to groups of radical Right-
wingers, neo-Nazis, white supremacist organisations, and the
British National Party. Mr Rampton quoted Mr Irving as
saying: "More women died on the back seat of Edward
Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than ever died in a gas
chamber in Auschwitz." He was referring to the 1969 US
scandal when passenger Mary Jo Kopechne died in an accident
in the senator's car.
Mr Irving, the author of Hitler's War and Goebbels:
Mastermind Of The Third Reich, told the court that Professor
Lipstadt 's book about the Holocaust and its publishers had
generated "waves of hatred" against him.
He said that he had always looked on his books as his
pension fund and a legacy for his four children, but that
was no longer the situation. "By virtue of the activities of
the defendants I have since 1996 seen one fearful publisher
after another falling away from me, declining to reprint my
works, refusing to accept new commissions and turning their
backs on me when I approach," he told Mr Justice Gray, who
is hearing the 12-week case without a jury.
He added: "Such is the nature of the odium that has been
generated by the waves of hatred recklessly propagated
against me by the defendants. In short my 'pension' has
vanished, as assuredly as if I had been employed by one of
those companies taken over by the late Mr Robert Maxwell."
He said he would not have faced "this hatred" if World War
Two, and in particular the Third Reich and its "criminal
leadership", had not been his area of expertise.
Mr Irving claims he has been libelled in Professor Lipstadt
's 1994 book, Denying The Holocaust: The Growing Assault On
Truth And Memory.
He says that it alleges that he has distorted statistics and
documents to serve his own ideological purposes and reach
historically untenable conclusions, and has knowingly
consorted with extremists.
Mr Irving, who is representing himself, said that the phrase
"Holocaust denier" had become "one of the most potent
phrases in the arsenal of insult".
"The word 'denier' is particularly evil because no person in
full command of his mental faculties, and with even the
slightest understanding of what happened in World War Two,
can deny that the tragedy actually happened." Dissident
historians, though, "may wish to quibble about the means,
the scale, the dates and other minutiae".
Penguin and Ms Lipstadt , professor of modern Jewish and
Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia,
deny libel and plead justification.The case continues.
***
Copyright 2000 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London)
January 12, 2000, Wednesday London Edition 2
HEADLINE: NATIONAL NEWS: Writer's action raises thorny
questions LIBEL HEARING
HISTORIAN SUES PUBLISHER AND US PROFESSOR OVER CLAIMS OF
DENYING HOLOCAUST:
BY: By JOHN MASON
BODY:
The long-awaited libel action between Penguin Books, the
international publishers, and David Irving, the
controversial second world war historian, over his version
of the Holocaust, began yesterday in the High Court.
The case will raise thorny issues such as: when are the
ideas of historians or academics so appalling their work
should be forever banned? Other issues include whether, or
where, one limits free speech. And what makes a good
historian anyway, especially when their subject is the most
emotive in 20th century history?
These apparently intractable ethical issues will, to some
extent, now be decided by a single judge, Mr Justice Gray.
The international publishing industry, with its commercial
interests, will be watching attentively.
David Irving, the historian of Hitler and other Nazi-related
subjects, accused Penguin Books and US author Prof Deborah
Lipstadt, of being part of an "organised international
endeavour" to destroy his reputation as a historian by
accusing him of distorting history and denying the Holocaust
took place.
"The word denyer is particularly evil because no person in
full command of their faculties with even the slightest
understanding of what happened in world war two can deny
that the tragedy actually happened, however much we
dissident historians may wish to quibble about the means,
the scale, the dates and other minutiae," he said.
Mr Irving is suing both Prof Lipstadt and Penguin (a
subsidiary of Pearson, the media group that also owns the
Financial Times), for damages over their claims. He is also
seeking an injunction to prevent further publication of the
allegations in Prof Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust.
Representing himself in court, Mr Irving claimed both
Penguin and Prof Lipstadt were "villains" who were part of
an internationally organised attempt to ruin his reputation.
Mr Irving said his books had been previously published by a
number of reputable publishers, including Penguin itself,
Macmillan and Simon and Schuster. However, as a result of
Penguin's allegations, leading publishers such as St
Martin's Press now refused to publish his work.
Richard Rampton QC, for Penguin, said: "Mr Irving calls
himself a historian. The truth is, however, that he is not a
historian at all, but a falsifier of history. To put it
bluntly, he is a liar."
Accusing Mr Irving of using disreputable methods, Mr Rampton
insisted he was a "Holocaust denyer", saying: "By this I
mean that he denies that the Nazis planned and carried out
the systematic murder or millions of Jews, in particular -
though by no means exclusively - by the use of homicidal gas
chambers and in particular at Auschwitz in southern Poland."
The case is due to last three months.
###
Conspiracy of hate is destroying me, says man at centre
of Holocaust debate
BILL MOULAND
01/12/2000
Daily Mail
Associated Newspapers Ltd.
1ST
Page 17
(Copyright 2000)
THE insult was 'Holocaust denier' and more than 60 years
since the start of World War II it ricocheted like a bullet around
an English courtroom yesterday.
It is fired at those who claim the eradication of six million Jews
by the Nazis is just a myth; and that gas chambers at death
camps such as Auschwitz were built as propaganda tools after
the war was over.
Yesterday it was aimed squarely at the Rightwing historian
David Irving, author of books on Adolf Hitler and Joseph
Goebbels, at the start of a libel action which is expected to last
three months.
Mr Irving, 62, is suing publishers Penguin and American author
Deborah Lipstadt , 52, over a book she wrote in 1993 called
Denying the Holocaust.
He said its attacks on him were part of an international
conspiracy, 'a wave of hatred', to stop him publishing his own
works and destroy his career.
A livelihood once worth more than 100,000 a year in royalties
was at stake.
'My Lord,' he told the judge, Mr Justice Gray, 'if I were to seek a
title for this libel action, I would venture to suggest Pictures At
An Execution.'
It took Mr Irving nearly two hours to read his 55-page opening
statement, and just a few seconds for Penguin's counsel
Richard Rampton QC to launch the counterattack.
'Mr Irving calls himself a historian, ' he began. 'The truth is,
however, that he is not a historian at all, but a falsifier of history.
To put it bluntly, he is a liar.
'Mr Irving has used many different means to falsify history:
invention, misquotation, suppression, distortion, manipulation
and not least mis-translation.
But all these techniques have the same ultimate effect:
falsification of the truth.' As his opponent sat a few yards to his
left along the same table, Mr Rampton produced a speech Mr
Irving had made at Calgary, Alberta in 1991.
'I don't see any reason to be tasteful about Auschwitz,' he had
said.
'It's baloney, it's a legend.
Once we admit the fact that it was a brutal slave labour camp
and large numbers of people did die, as large numbers of
innocent people died elsewhere in the War, why believe the
rest of the baloney?
'I say quite tastelessly, in fact, that more women died on the
back seat of Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than
ever died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz.
'Oh, you think that's tasteless.
How about this? There are so many Auschwitz survivors going
around in fact the number increases as the years go past,
which is biologically very odd, to
say the least. Because I'm going to form an Association of
Auschwitz Survivors, Survivors of the Holocaust and Other
Liars, or the ASS-HO-LS.' Mr Rampton told the judge, who is
hearing the case without a jury, that Mr Irving's words provoked
laughter among his audience 'the laughter of mockery, mockery
of the suffering of others people whom, on this and other
occasions, Mr Irving has accused of lying about their Holocaust
experiences, or forging Auschwitz tattoos on their arms, of
deserving both contempt and the attention of psychiatrists'.
He accused Mr Irving of being driven by extremist views and
sympathies to deliberately falsify 'this tragic episode in history'.
'By exposing that dangerous fraud in this court, the defendants
may properly be applauded for having performed a significant
public service, not just in this country, but in all those places in
the world where anti-semitism is waiting to be fed.' Mr Irving,
who is presenting his own case, said that far from being 'a
Holocaust denier' he had repeatedly drawn attention to it, and
described it.
'I submit that, harsh though it may seem, the court should take
no interest in that tragedy,' he said. 'The court may well
disagree with me, and show a profound interest in it; but in my
submission we have to avoid the temptations of raking over the
history of what happened in Poland or in Russia 50 years ago.
What is moot here is not what happened in those sites of
atrocities but what happened over the last 32 years, on my
writing desk in my apartment off Grosvenor Square.' Miss
Lipstadt and her publishers were part of 'an organised
international endeavour' to 'destroy my career, and to vandalise
my legitimacy as a historian,' he said. 'I have since 1966 seen
one fearful publisher after another falling away from me,
declining to reprint my works, refusing to accept new
commissions and turning their backs on me when I approach,'
he said.
'In private, the senior editors at those publishing houses still
welcome me warmly as a friend, invite me to lunch in expensive
New York restaurants and then lament that if they were to seek
a contract with me on a new book, there would always be
someone in their publishing house who would object.
'Such is the nature of the odium generated by the waves of
hatred recklessly propagated against me by the defendants.'
His enemies, he claimed, had him expelled from Canada in
handcuffs in 1992, falsely said his first wife was the daughter of
one of General Franco's top generals and implied he was
being paid by Nazi fugitives in South America. The term
'holocaust denier,' he said 'had become one of the most potent
phrases in the arsenal of insult, replacing the N-word, the
F-word, and a whole alphabet of other slurs.
'Meaningless though it is, the phrase has become part of the
English language. It is a poison to which there is virtually no
antidote, less lethal than a hypodermic with nerve gas jabbed
in the neck, but deadly all the same.
'For the chosen victim, it is like being called a wife-beater or a
paedophile. It is enough for the label to be attached, for the
attachee to find himself designated as a pariah, an outcast
from normal society. It is a verbal Yellow Star.' The case
continues.
Courtroom coverage from the Israeli press after Jerusalem Post earlier this
week.
Top News
Trial opens in Holocaust libel suit
Sharon Sadeh, Ha'aretz Correspondent
01/12/2000
Ha'aretz
Copyright (C) 2000 Ha'aretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. Tel Aviv,
Israel; Source: World Reporter (TM)
Hunters want UK man
LONDON - The libel suit initiated by controversial British historian David
Irving against an American historian who called him "a dangerous spokesman for
Holocaust denial" began yesterday with Irving declaring, "For years I have
turned the other cheek. No more.
Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University in Atlanta had called Irving "a dangerous
spokesman for Holocaust denial." Irving claims that Lipstadt 's book,
published in 1994, irreversibly destroyed his career and that Lipstadt and
Penguin Books, which is also being sued by Irving, are part of "an organized
international effort" to destroy his reputation as a historian.
Irving, who specializes in the study of World War II, has published two books,
"Hitler's War," and "Goebbels: The Mastermind of the Third Reich." As the
trial opened in the High Court of London, Irwin claimed, "By virtue of the
activities of the defendants, I have, since 1996, seen one fearful publisher
after another falling away from me, declining to reprint my works, refusing to
accept new commissions and turning their backs on me when I approach."
Irving, 62, who is representing himself, told the judge that he had once
earned about 100,000 pounds sterling a year in royalties, but that the actions
of the defendants had caused him "real financial damage."
Irving said that Lipstadt 's book, "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault
on Truth and Memory," accused him of denying the Holocaust, distorting
documents and statistics to serve his own ideological ends, drawing
unacceptable historical conclusions and knowingly joining with extremists.
"Far from being a Holocaust denier, all I want is to draw attention to major
aspects of history - to describe them. I have selflessly done vital historical
research. No person in full command of his mental faculties can deny that the
tragedy actually happened, however much we dissident historians may wish to
quibble about the means, the scale, the dates and other minutiae."
The attorney representing Penguin and Lipstadt , Richard Rampton, rejected
these claims, terming Irving "a distorter of history, a liar and a Holocaust
denier." He maintained that Irving denied the existence of a systematic plan
of the Nazis to annihilate the Jews of Europe, that he denied that the gas
chambers were used to execute this plan and that he harbored extreme views
that knowingly presented a distorted view of history.
The trial is expected to last 12 weeks without interruption and will not be
held before a jury. Both sides agreed that because of the huge volume of
documents involved, it would be preferable for the case to be heard before a
judge.In another matter related to the Holocaust, the Simon Weisenthal Center
appealed yesterday to British Home Secretary Jack Straw, requesting that he
revoke the citizenship of Antanas Gecas, a British citizen of Lithuanian
extraction living in Edinburgh, and deport him from Britain.
According to Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon Weisenthal Center in
Jerusalem, Gecas, who arrived in Britain in the late 1940s, has admitted to
U.S. investigators that he had served in the battalion of the Latvian security
police that murdered tens of thousands of citizens, most of whom were Jews, in
Lithuania and Belorussia.
###

This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.

As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.